Part 9

The last speeches were over, but Mr. William Belden’s triumph had not ended. As the acknowledged orator of the evening he had an ovation afterward; introductions and unlimited hand-shakings were in order.

He was asked to speak at a select political dinner the next week; to speak for the hospital fund; to speak for the higher education of woman. Led by a passing remark of Henry Belden’s to infer that his cousin was a whist player of parts, a prominent social magnate at once invited him to join the party at his house on one of their whist evenings.

“My wife, er—will have great pleasure in calling on Mrs. Belden,” said the magnate. “We did not know that we had a good whist player among us. This evening has indeed been a revelation in many ways—in many ways. You would have no objection to taking a prominent part in politics, if you were called upon? A reform mayor is sadly needed in our city—sadly needed. Your connection with Judge Belden would give great weight to any proposition of that kind. But, of course, all this is in the future.”

Mr. Belden heard his name whispered in another direction, in connection with the cashiership of the new bank which was to be built. The cashiership and the mayoralty might be nebulous honors, but it _was_ sweet, for once, to be recognized for what he was—a man of might; a man of talent, and of honor.

There was a hurried rush for the train at the last on the part of the visitors. Mr. William Belden snatched his mackintosh from the peg whereon it had hung throughout the evening, and went with the crowd, talking and laughing in buoyant exuberance of spirits. The night had cleared, the moon was rising, and poured a flood of light upon the wet streets. It was a different world from the one he had traversed earlier in the evening. He walked home with Miss Wakeman’s exaggeratedly tender “Good-by, dear Billy!” ringing in his ears, to provoke irrepressible smiles. The pulse of a free life, where men lived instead of vegetating, was in his veins. His footstep gave forth a ringing sound from the pavement; he felt himself stalwart, alert, his brain rejoicing in its sense of power. It was even with no sense of guilt that he heard the church clocks striking twelve as he reached the house where his wife had been awaiting his return for four hours.

She was sitting up for him, as he knew by the light in the parlor window. He could see her through the half-closed blinds as she sat by the table, a magazine in her lap, her attitude, unknown to herself, betraying a listless depression. After all, is a woman glad to have all her aspirations and desires confined within four walls? She may love her cramped quarters, to be sure, but can she always forget that they are cramped? To what does a wife descend after the bright dreams of her girlhood! Does she really like above all things to be absorbed in the daily consumption of butter, and the children’s clothes, or is she absorbed in these things because the man who was to have widened the horizon of her life only limits it by his own decadence?

She rose to meet her husband as she heard his key in the lock. She had exchanged her evening gown for a loose, trailing white wrapper, and her fair hair was arranged for the night in a long braid. Her husband had a smile on his face.

“You look like a girl again,” he said brightly, as he stooped and kissed her. “No, don’t turn out the light; come in and sit down a while longer, I’ve ever so much to tell you. You can’t guess where I’ve been this evening.”

“At the political meeting,” she said promptly.

“How on earth did you know?”

“The doctor came here to see Willy, and he told me he saw you on the way. I’m glad you did go, William; I was worrying because I had sent you out; I did not realize until later what a night it was.”

“Well, I am very glad that you did send me,” said her husband. He lay back in his chair, flushed and smiling at the recollection. “You ought to have been there, too; you would have liked it. What will you say if I tell you that I made a speech—yes, it is quite true—and was applauded to the echo. This town has just waked up to the fact that I live in it. And Henry said—but there, I’ll have to tell you the whole thing, or you can’t appreciate it.”

His wife leaned on the arm of his chair, watching his animated face fondly, as he recounted the adventures of the night. He pictured the scene vividly, and with a strong sense of humor.

“And you don’t say that Marie Wakeman is the same as ever?” she interrupted with a flash of special interest. “Oh, William!”

“_She_ called me Billy.” He laughed anew at the thought. “Upon my word, Nettie, she beats anything I ever saw or heard of.”

“Did she remind you of the time you kissed her?”

“Yes!” Their eyes met in amused recognition of the past.

“Is she as handsome as ever?”

“Um—yes—I think so. She isn’t as pretty as you are.”

“Oh, Will!” She blushed and dimpled.

“I declare, it is true!” He gazed at her with genuine admiration. “What has come over you to-night, Nettie?—you look like a girl again.”

“And you were not sorry when you saw her, that—that—”

“Sorry! I have been thinking all the way home how glad I was to have won my sweet wife. But we mustn’t stay shut up at home as much as we have; it’s not good for either of us. We are to be asked to join the whist club—what do you think of that? You used to be a little card fiend once upon a time, I remember.”

She sighed. “It is so long since I have been anywhere! I’m afraid I haven’t any clothes, Will. I suppose I _might_—”

“What, dear?”

“Take the money I had put aside for Mary’s next quarter’s music lessons; I do really believe a little rest would do her good.”

“It would—it would,” said Mr. Belden with suspicious eagerness. Mary’s after-dinner practicing hour had tinged much of his existence with gall. “I insist that Mary shall have a rest. And you shall join the reading society now. Let us consider ourselves a little as well as the children; it’s really best for them, too. Haven’t we immortal souls as well as they? Can we expect them to seek the honey dew of paradise while they see us contented to feed on the grass of the field?”

“You call yourself an orator!” she scoffed.

He drew her to him by one end of the long braid, and solemnly kissed her. Then he went into the hall and took something from the pocket of his mackintosh which he placed in his wife’s hand—a little wooden dish covered with a paper, through which shone a bright yellow substance—the pound of butter, a lump of gleaming fairy gold, the quest of which had changed a poor, commonplace existence into one scintillating with magic possibilities.

Fairy gold, indeed, cannot be coined into marketable eagles. Mr. William Belden might never achieve either the mayoralty or the cashiership, but he had gained that of which money is only a trivial accessory. The recognition of men, the flashing of high thought to high thought, the claim of brotherhood in the work of the world, and the generous social intercourse that warms the heart—all these were to be his. Not even his young ambition had promised a wider field, not the gold of the Indies could buy him more of honor and respect.

At home also the spell worked. He had but to speak the word, to name the thing, and Nettie embodied his thought. He called her young, and happy youth smiled from her clear eyes; beautiful, and a blushing loveliness enveloped her; clever, and her ready mind leaped to match with his in thought and study; dear, and love touched her with its transforming fire and breathed of long-forgotten things.

If men only knew what they could make of the women who love them—but they do not, as the plodding, faded matrons who sit and sew by their household fires testify to us daily.

Happy indeed is he who can create a paradise by naming it!

A Matrimonial Episode

A Matrimonial Episode

IT was in the year that Dick Martindale spent out West in the service of the Electrographic Company that his wife became acquainted with Sarah Latimer. Although the latter was by birth a Western girl she had lived long enough in the East to seem like a compatriot to Bertha Martindale, who had come from the dear gregarious suburban life with its commingling of family interests and sympathy, to a land peopled thinly with her husband’s friends, mostly men. Dick laughingly asserted that she had never forgiven him for his few years of Western life previous to their marriage, ascribing all his faults of habit and expression to that demoralizing influence, and he wondered at her courage in exposing little Rich and Mary to the chance of acquiring the wide ease and carelessness she objected to in him. He had been a little uneasy, in view of her previous opinions, as to the manner in which she would dispense hospitality in the little furnished house that they hired, but he need not have feared. Bertha had always been used to popularity.

“Don’t you think I get on well with people?” she asked.

“Like a bird,” said her husband.

“No, but really. Don’t you think I adapt myself?”

“You do so much adapting that I’m getting afraid of you.”

“_Don’t._” She put his newspaper one side and kissed him, and he submitted to the caress patiently, his eyes still following the paragraph on which they had been fixed.

“The two women I really feel at home with,” she continued musingly, “are the clergyman’s wife, who is just a _dear_, poor soul! and a living reproach to everyone, and Sarah Latimer. I wonder that you never told me about her, Richard.”

“Sarah Latimer! I always thought she was a stick,” said Richard, glancing up from the newspaper.

“Well, she is not, at all; at any rate, she’s only the least little bit stick-y. Oh! I suppose if I were at home I mightn’t have taken such a fancy to her, but out here—! and I do think it’s pathetic about her.”

“How on earth you can discover anything pathetic about Sarah Latimer, Bertha, beats me. That long, sandy-haired wisp of a girl! Let me alone; I want to read my paper.”

“No,” she held the paper down with one hand. “It’s really important; do listen to me, Dick! I want to do something for her.”

“You _are_ doing something for her; you have her here morning, noon, and night. She’s forever going about with little Rich and Mary; people will be taking her for my wife some day, you just see if they don’t. I nearly kissed her by mistake for you yesterday; she was right in the way as I came in the door. Now don’t feel jealous!”

“No, I won’t,” said Bertha with indignation. “But look here, Dick! I know she is with us a good deal, but I do want to give her a chance.”

“A chance of what?”

“A chance to enjoy herself, and to see people, and to feel that she’s young, and—oh, a chance to get married, if you _will_ have me say it.”

“I thought so,” said Dick. “You may as well let her go back to private life, Bertha; she’ll never be a success on any stage of _that_ kind. I don’t believe any man ever wanted to marry her, or ever will.”

“You can’t tell,” said Bertha musingly. “So many fellows come here! I should think some of them might fancy her.”

“No, they will not,” said Richard deliberately. “You mark my words; that girl will never get married. Yes, I know she’s good, and she’s clever, and really not bad looking, either, when you take her to pieces. But she’s not interesting—that’s the gist of the whole matter, and nothing you can say or do will alter that.”

“She may not be interesting to you, but she is to me,” returned Bertha. “And that argument goes for nothing, Dick. Scores of uninteresting girls get married every year. Here is Sarah Latimer at thirty, or near it, with nothing in this world to occupy her, or take up her attention. Her uncle and aunt are very good to her, but they don’t need her—she is rather in the way, if anything. That big house is all solemnly comfortable and well arranged, and oppressively neat. The servants have been there for years. The furniture was bought in the age when it was made to last, and it _has_ lasted. The curtains are always drawn in the parlor, and if a chink of light comes in, Mrs. Latimer draws them closer; everything is dim and well preserved, and smells stuffy when it doesn’t smell of oilcloth. It gives me the creeps!”

“You are eloquent,” said Richard.

“There is only one place that looks as if it were ever used,” continued Bertha, unheeding, “and that’s the sitting-room off the parlor. It has a faded green lounge in it, and discolored family photographs in oval walnut frames, and two big haircloth rockers, with tidies on them, on either side of the table, which holds a lamp, a newspaper—not a pile of them, they are always cleared away neatly—and a piece of knitting work. Here Mr. and Mrs. Latimer doze all the evening.”

“What on earth has all this to do with Sarah’s marriage?” asked Richard.

“Everything! Don’t you see that the poor girl is just being choked by degrees; it’s a case of slow suffocation. She lived East after she left school until five years ago, and came back to find her girl friends married and moved away. People, of course, sent her invitations, and were polite to her, but there seemed no particular place for her, anywhere. She’s too clever for most of the men here, and her standard is above them. She’s what _I_ call a _very_ highly educated girl.”

“You seem to suit them,” said Richard, laughing.

“I’m naturally frivolous,” said Bertha with a sigh, “but Sarah isn’t. If she only had to work for a living she would be a great success, but she has enough of a little income to support her. She reads to Rich and Mary, and she is giving music lessons to some little girls just for occupation. Besides, she practices Beethoven three hours a day—she’s making a specialty of the sonatas. She reads Herbert Spencer a great deal, and has theories of education, and on governing children. I’m afraid that neither Mr. Allenton nor your friend Dick Quimby care about sonatas or Herbert Spencer.”

“Not a hang!” said Richard. “If she could play the banjo, or give them a dance—by Jove, I’d like to see Sarah Latimer dance a—”

“Richard!” cried Bertha, indignantly. “If you’re going to be _horrid_ I’ll go away, I won’t say another word.”

“Then I’ll _be_ horrid, for I don’t want you to say another word! I’m dead sick of Sarah with her pale, moony eyes and her straw-colored smile—send her to Jericho, and let me read my newspaper, and don’t embrace me _any_ more, you’ll muss my hair.” He turned and kissed his wife as an offset to the words.

Bertha could not help owning to herself that week that Sarah was a little heavy. She was a tall, thin girl, with a long nose, light gray eyes, and a quantity of sandy red hair. She had no color in her cheeks, and she had a peculiar look of withered youth, like a bud that the frost has touched. Beneath that outer crust of primness and shyness there was, as Bertha had divined, an absolutely virginal heart, as untried in the ways of love or love’s pretense as that of a child of six. She had not had any real girlhood yet at all, while she was apparently long past it. Bertha wondered at that slow development, which occurs much oftener than she dreamed of.

She asked Sarah indefatigably to spend the evenings with her. On these occasions Sarah sat completely, appallingly silent amid the jokes and laughter of the others. Bertha had long consultations with her dear friend, the clergyman’s wife, about her.

“She will never like anyone who is not on the highest intellectual plane,” said Bertha with a sigh; “but there’s a sort of wistful sentimentality through it all that makes me so sorry!”

It was some days after this that Bertha sat one morning cutting out garments for little Rich and Mary, when Sarah Latimer came in. The children greeted her, but not effusively. They were always instructed to be on their best behavior in her presence, and regarded her more as an awe-inspiring companion, who read to them, took them walking, and picked up blocks for them, than as a friend to be loved; she was always oppressively quiet while they chattered.

“Sit down, Sarah,” said Bertha cordially, sweeping a pile of cambrics from a chair. “Here’s a fan, if you want it, but _you_ don’t look a bit hot; you never do. I think you’re pale this morning. Aren’t you well?”

“Why, yes,” said Sarah slowly. Her eyes had a dazed look in them, and there was an uncertain note in her voice.

Bertha observed her critically. Sarah’s drab gown, made with severe plainness, took all the life out of her hair and complexion, and made her tall figure gaunt. Bertha cast her brown eyes down at her own lilac muslin, overflowing with little rippling frills and furbelows, and sighed, a genuine sigh of pity, for another woman’s misuse of her opportunities.

“What have you been doing lately, Sarah? I haven’t seen you for some days.”

“Nothing much,” said Sarah.

“I expected you yesterday; Dick Quimby asked why you were not here. He’s asked after you twice lately, Sarah. I think he’s beginning to be fond of you.”

“Because he asked after me twice?” said Sarah. “Perhaps he’ll propose to me to-morrow.” She gave a spasmodic laugh, and the color came and went in her face. Bertha gazed at her in genuine surprise.

“I don’t know what’s the matter with you, Sarah,” she said. “I’m glad you came in, for I wanted to ask you to join us in a little trip to the Lakes. Dick has to go Thursday, and we have concluded to make up a party. We’ll be gone a couple of weeks, and Mr. Quimby is to join us there. I think we’ll have a lovely time.”

“You’re very kind,” said Sarah, pulling nervously at her fan, “but I don’t think I can go.”

“Why not? You won’t have to dress.”

“It’s not that. The fact is—Did I ever speak to you of Will Bronson?”

“No, who is he?”

“I had almost forgotten that myself,” said Sarah, “until he came to call yesterday. I knew him years ago when I was a young girl; we went to school together. He was a nice boy, but I never had much to do with him; boys never cared for me as they did for other girls. At any rate, he came to see us yesterday. He lives in Idaho; he’s been out there for a dozen years, and he says he’s pretty well off.”

“Well,” said Bertha expectantly, as the other stopped, “what does he look like?”

“Oh, he’s pretty tall, and he has a big brown beard.”

“I suppose that he is intellectual?”

“Not a bit! He’s very—very—Western. You think we are Western _here_, Bertha, but we’re not.”

“And is this gentleman stopping with you?” pursued Bertha.

“No, he left for New York to-day.”

“Then why can’t you join our party for the Lakes?”

“Because—” The fan dropped from Sarah’s fingers. “The truth is, Bertha, he asked me to marry him; that’s what he came for.”

“_What!_” cried Bertha.

“He brought some letters to uncle,” went on Sarah, “recommendations, and all that, and afterwards he spoke to me. He says he’s always thought he’d marry me when he had time, but he has never been able to leave the mines before. He has an aunt who lives here, and she has written to him about me, sometimes. He has gone on to New York for a week, and wants to stop back here over one day to get married and then go straight out to Idaho. He wanted me to answer him yesterday, but I asked him to give me until this morning to make up my mind.”

“And what did you say then?” asked Bertha breathlessly.

“I said yes,” said Sarah.

Bertha rose up, heedless of all her sewing materials, which dropped on the floor, and walking over to Sarah, solemnly embraced her.

“You are a dear girl,” she said. Then she took Sarah’s hand in hers, solicitously. “Hadn’t you better lie down, Sarah, and let me bathe your forehead and get you a glass of lemonade?”

“I’m not ill,” said the girl with a convulsive laugh.

“You are just shaking all over,” said Bertha, “and no wonder! Do you think you _love_ him, Sarah?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, you are sure he loves you?”

“He says he does.”

“And does he seem perfectly splendid to you, dear?”

“I guess so,” said Sarah.

“And you are to be married—when? A week from to-day? Oh, _what_ a time you will have getting your clothes! And to think I’ll not be here at the wedding—it’s too, too bad. Sarah, I’m just delighted with you. I always knew you weren’t like other people; most girls wouldn’t have dared.”

“Maybe I’ll wish that I hadn’t,” said Sarah, and the dazed, vacant expression came back with the words.

Richard and his friends were at first incredulous when Bertha narrated the news to them; then, to quote Dick’s expression, Sarah’s stock, in the general estimation, went up fifty per cent.

“The old girl must have had something jolly about her, after all,” he said. “You were right this time, Bertha. I met this Bronson once, and he’s a good fellow. What a lot of courage he must have!”

Bertha only met Sarah once after this before she left for the Lakes. She saw the bridegroom’s picture, which represented him as a tall, stalwart fellow, with a big beard and merry, honest eyes. Bertha liked the face, and felt that it was one that inspired confidence.

“To think that after all my planning she should have done it just by herself,” said Bertha to her husband, “and it was such an _unlikely_ thing.”

“It _is_ singular that the world can move without your pushing it,” replied her husband with a quizzical smile.

Within a few months the Martindales’ plans were broken up; their stay West was no longer necessary, and they went back home again. Bertha received one letter from Sarah after her marriage, a singularly flat and colorless epistle, which told nothing. Bertha had periodical times of wonderment as to Sarah’s present life and chances of happiness. Her own short experience of Western life resolved itself mainly into a recollection of the girl with whom, after all, she had been most intimately associated, and who had disappeared from her horizon so suddenly and romantically.

It was not until three years later that she heard of Sarah again. Then she received a note from Mrs. Bronson, who, it appeared, had come East for a few days and was stopping at a large hotel in town.

Bertha was delighted. With a whimsical remembrance of her long, tedious days with Sarah was a real affection for her. She left the children at home, although they clamored to be taken to see their old friend.

She felt that there was so much to talk about that she must be absolutely untrammeled. How she would astonish Dick when he came home!

As she ascended in the gorgeous elevator, her mind mechanically reverted to Sarah’s former surroundings; she was glad to be able to infer that the silver mines had proved fortunate. She was shown into a private parlor, equally gorgeous in its appointments. She heard the sound of a laughing voice in the adjoining room, and the next moment a porti—re was pushed aside and Sarah appeared. She was dressed in a trailing silken tea-gown of a deep crimson tint—her hair shone like a coronal of gold, there was a rosy flush on her cheeks, and her eyes gleamed with merriment. In her arms she held a handsome baby boy of about a year old, who suddenly turned and ducked his head into his mother’s neck as he saw the stranger, taking hold of her hair with both hands and giving it a pull that loosened its fastenings and sent it tumbling around them both.

“You little rogue,” she said. “His nurse has gone out for a few moments, and I don’t know what to do with him. Keep still, Wilfred.”

Two small, fat, black-stockinged feet, like little puddings, were kicking wildly in a vain attempt to get up on her shoulder, and, presumably, over on the other side, where his head and hands already were, as far as possible from the strange lady.

Sarah sat down on the sofa, clasping the boy in one arm; with the other she swept the tumbled hair back from her face.

“Now I can at least look at you, Bertha,” she said.